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Greetings,
Thank you for
subscribing to Capability Company’s nonprofit
employer ezine. This month’s article is about
interviewing techniques, one of the trickiest parts of
hiring the right candidate. I hope you find these tips
useful in discovering your candidate’s talents and
challenges.
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Rebecca L. Worters
A Guideline for Interviewing: Getting to Know
Candidates
By
Laura Gassner Otting, President, Nonprofit Professionals
Advisory Group
(This article was originally published
by
http://www.nonprofitoyster.com/,
as part of their NonprofitOyster Pearls series.)
Volume 1 / Issue 5 / November 12,
2003
There are many different types of
interviews – telephone, progressive, committee, individual –
and all sorts of ways to do them better. Most start with
better questions.
In addition to general questions about
qualifications for the job in question or passion and
knowledge for your organization and its mission, you may
want to ask the following specific questions:
1. For entrepreneurial
positions: Describe a situation in which you
created something, with your own energy, direction and
ideas, and what became of it. Provide some examples of
systems that have improved or were strengthened under your
watch, and describe how you did it. Are these systems still
in place?
2. For management positions:
What is your experience managing people and budgets? Have
you operated in an environment with similar complexity as
our organization as we've described it? What challenges and
strengths have you experienced in current or previous
similar environments? How would your bosses, staff, peers
characterize them? Do you have experience successfully
managing an organization about to experience significant
growth? How was that accomplished?
3. For support positions:
Tell me about a time when you successfully changed your
supervisor's mind. What kind of direction do you need, and
how do you ask for help? What would you consider to be the
areas in which you have grown most during the past five
years?
4. For development positions:
Relative to our current funding sources, where can you
further diversify our funding base, and where can you help
solidify it? What are the most important things on which to
focus during a fundraising campaign? Tell us about your
experiences in these areas. What have been your most
significant accomplishments in these areas? What have been
your biggest mistakes? What have you learned?
5. For program positions:
What types of programs have you created/run in the past?
How have you assessed program success or failure and how
have you changed programs accordingly?
Read more about the types of interviews and general
interviewing tips here.
Laura Gassner Otting is founder and
president of
Nonprofit Professionals Advisory Group,
a niche consulting firm dedicated to
strengthening the capacity of nonprofits and their staff,
and is available to discuss individual resumes, cover
letters, and job search strategies.
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